Greentext

For the average man making unsolicited approaches, the latest stats I have seen tend to bounce between the 1-in-300 and the 1-in-1,500 range of a successful approach per total attempts. And this is just first-date-is-successful territory, it gets a good magnitude worse if you are looking for an LTR.

From what I understand, the flip side is a lot lower: an average women making unsolicited approaches to men seem to be hitting a 1-in-5 to 1-in-20 success range, depending on conditions

So yeah, being a man outside of the desirable 10% is indeed playing on hard mode. And from what I can see, things have only gotten much, much worse for the average man in the last few decades since I was young. I don’t envy young men these days, at all.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong

You are suffering from a lack of experience.

Women have the ability to learn by proxy, when having intimate conversations with sisters, mothers, aunts, and other female role models. This gives them a massive buff long before they ever begin dating, because they are able to gain an emotional roadmap of how things go down, and then build on that with experience.

Men don’t have this same transfer of knowledge, nor are we even psychologically set up to build one, so in aggregate we are massively nerfed straight out of the gate. This means our only way of learning is via direct experience and sheer volume: you need to circulate and learn from your experiences in order to percolate. It sucks, but that’s the breaks. The rare guy will get lucky straight out of the gate. The vast majority, however, will have to approach and be rejected by many hundreds to even thousands of women before they “find their groove” enough to catch a break.

And your own insecurities are working against you: being nervous, desperate, or unsure of yourself is something that women - again, through that buff of intergenerational information transfer - are able to “smell” almost instinctively. If you want to vanquish those issues, you quite literally need to work on yourself, to focus on improving yourself and gaining confidence within yourself by overcoming obstacles and challenges that you set for yourself.

Stoicism can assist in helping you become a better version of yourself, in becoming intrinsically motivated such that companionship shifts away from being a clawing need to merely a value-added proposition.